Healing

Healing. In the religious perspective, disease and dis-ease are never far removed from each other. Since an aim of religions is to offer the means through which health in body, mind, and spirit may be attained (unless countervailing causes supervene, such as karma, the will of God, invasion by demons, etc.). Thus Augustine observed succinctly that ‘all diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons’; and the contest with demons is familiar in the descriptions of the healing of particular disorders in the ministry of Jesus, which was to him (and others) a demonstration that the dunamis (power or dynamic) of God is active in the world.

The contest against disease was continued in Islam, through which Greek medical knowledge was preserved and extended. al-Ṭibb (‘medicine’) became a major part of the Muslim commitment to ʿilm (knowledge)—e.g. al-Rāzī (Rhazes).

Indian medical science is known as Ayur veda (‘the knowledge of longevity’), and is based on a theory of five elements (bhūta) and three humours (dośa), wind, bile, and phlegm. Health consisted in maintaining all in balance and equilibrium, correcting imbalance by an array of herbal and other remedies. Thus health matters are not isolated from the general condition of life. Carakasamhita is a classic text on medicine (compiled in the 1st cent. BCE; Suśruta Samhita is a slightly later text on surgery): it combines health and medical matters with general instructions for the achieving of a good and satisfactory life.

The same catholicity of attitude is evident in China, where the quest for immortality in religious Taoism (Tao-chiao/Daojiao) is not restricted to an endeavour to emancipate a self from society or a soul from a body. Taoists seek to relate the microcosm—which is present in the body in the three life-principles of breath (ch'i/qi), vitality especially in semen (ching/jing), and spirit (shen)—to the macrocosm, so that the whole of life, internal and external, becomes an unresistant (wu-wei) expression of that which alone truly is, namely, the Tao. It would thus be impossible to isolate some part of disease or disorder from its context.

Healing, therefore, in all religions takes place in a much larger context of life and its purposes, and remains closely related to modern insights into the psychosomatic unity of the human entity.

For the Buddhist ‘Master of Healing’, see BHAIṢAJYAGURU.